Photograph by: Jean Levac
, Ottawa Citizen/Postmedia News

OTTAWA — Elections Canada investigators have arranged to interview Conservative campaign workers on Tuesday as part of their probe into apparently deceptive and fraudulent election calls in ridings across Canada, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation.

The interviews come as investigators sort through newly-obtained phone records they hope will help locate the source of suspect election calls in 85 ridings across Canada.

The news that investigators are to talk to Conservative campaign workers could be a significant step forward in a national investigation that appeared to be waiting for Conservative co-operation.

Investigator John Dickson filed court documents in which he reports calling Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton on Aug. 7 to request interviews with campaign workers. Almost three months later, on Oct. 30, Hamilton advised Dickson “that he anticipates being able to facilitate such interviews in the near future.”

Hamilton, who could not be reached for comment on Monday, handled emails from Elections Canada about apparent deceptive poll-moving calls when the agency first started to field complaints a few days before the election, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act.

Last week, an Ontario court released a document Dickson filed in November, seeking an order compelling Rogers Communications to provide records of incoming and outgoing calls received in the week before the May 2, 2011 election.

The document, called an Information to Obtain (ITO), was based on 45 complaints Elections Canada received from Rogers customers, including 34 that reported receiving calls misdirecting them to the wrong polling station — both live calls and pre-recorded robocalls — and 30 reported receiving harassing calls, often calls purporting to be from one political party but seemingly designed to alienate that party’s supporters.

The ITO became public on Thursday when Dickson filed a statement with the court indicating that Rogers had turned over the documents requested. The record shows that Rogers sent the phone records in Microsoft Excel format in a series of emails over the past month.

Elections Canada investigators are expected to use the incoming call data to trace the calls back to their origin, a process that will require at least one more set of court orders on phone carriers. They will also likely compare these records to other data already obtained from phone companies Shaw and Videotron to see if the complaints received calls from the same numbers.

So far, there is no indication Elections Canada has obtained phone records from Bell, one of the country’s largest phone providers, and it is unclear if the company has retained the records from April and May 2011.

Last week, the agency was trying to iron out the terms of interviews between investigators and people who had worked on Conservative campaigns at the riding level. One point of discussion was whether Hamilton should listen in on the interviews.

Hamilton has been actively assisting Elections Canada with the separate but related investigation into the “Pierre Poutine” election day robocalls in Guelph, Ont.

The interviews that were scheduled for Tuesday concern calls apparently made by the local Conservative campaigns. Elections Canada wants to determine whether certain calls they are looking into came from legitimate party sources or whether they were from someone pretending to be with the party.

Investigators have already interviewed opposition campaign workers, who said they were not responsible for late-night calls that purported to come from their candidates.

Like a similar document intended to obtain phone records from Shaw telephone customers, the document released last week also refers to the recording of a call received on election day by Donna O’Reilly, a Liberal campaign volunteer in the Ontario riding of London West.

The message captured by O’Reilly’s voice mail purports to be a get-out-the-vote call from Liberal candidate Doug Ferguson and directs her to a voting location far from her home. The message is recorded in a female voice with what sounds like a slight American accent.

According to Dickson’s statement, Ferguson said his campaign did not make the call.

Ferguson told the Citizen that other voters in his riding had reported similar calls and one had said the call display on his phone indicated it came from the Dakotas in the United States.

Dickson notes that Elections Canada received 43 individual complaints about inappropriate phone calls from the London area.

“Although many Rogers complainants have provided anecdotal and often incomplete information pertaining to inappropriate election related calls, the reliability of their recollections is supported by the similarities of the complaints of others and to the complaint that included a recording of a received call.”

After media reports came to light about the investigation into the “Pierre Poutine” call in February 2012, Elections Canada was inundated with complaints from across the country, mostly of calls that appeared designed to discourage opposition supporters from going to the polls, either by providing false information about polling station locations, or by harassing rude calls pretending to come from an opposition party.

Of the 1,399 specific complaints, 1,043 “relate to complaints of misdirection,” either by live callers or robocall, and 857 involve complaints about harassing calls (many people complained of both misdirection and harassing calls.)

Many of the calls defy any pattern, since they took place in non-competitive ridings, but other complaints detailed in the court documents are clustered in close ridings, such as Saanich-Gulf islands, Kitchener—Waterloo and Eglinton-Lawrence.

Fred DeLorey, the spokesman for the Conservative Party, said Monday that the party is helping Elections Canada.

“The Conservative Party proactively reached out to Elections Canada and continues to assist them in any way we can,” he said. “That includes handing over any documents or records that may assist them. We will not comment on specifics as we do not want to compromise any part of the investigation.”

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